Summary: Kiba's ridiculously strong teeth are bared and they sink into the ghoulish flesh of the zetsu's neck like it's as easy as Neji's seen him eat an apple. he tears his head to the side and the skin comes away with him.
The clone screams like it can actually feel and it touches something deep inside Neji's stomach. White hot anger that he's been trying to find - anything better than the sickly exhaustion that's been eating away at him.
They are the ones suffering.
War hurts people, changes them, chews them up and spits them out. And Neji finds himself right in the middle of one.
Kiba hauls himself upright and the zetsu corpse falls to his feet, mangled in the dirt. He steps over it without hesitation and walks up beside Neji.
He flexes his shoulders and something between a groan and a growl ripples out of his throat. "Here more of the bastards come," he says.
His voice lacks… anything, Neji thinks.
Kiba's always been full of something whether that be anger, competitiveness, protectiveness or happiness, but there is nothing.
Neji had wanted this day when Kiba finally stopped being so loud and obnoxious but he thinks this is worse.
His face isn't impassive, per say, but it's different from what Neji has ever seen on him before.
Anger is the closest thing he can put it too.
Neji has always associated Kiba with the anger that boiling, hot, fiery and full of annoying intensity. But this is cold. It's icy and frustrated.
Neji's known Kiba since their Academy days, but he feels like he knows nothing of the person standing next to him right now.
Neji breathes out a tired sigh and wipes futilely at the dirt across his face, bet he's pretty sure he only managed to spread it.
A zetsu clone hauls itself over a rock and Kiba charges at it, Akamaru at his side. Another follows it and Neji finds himself falling into familiar stances. He's not sure when he stopped being scared and bone-deep exhaustion started to replace it, but he feels it now.
They've been at this for what feels like a lifetime and he's over it.
People keep dying and Neji's always prided himself on holding himself together, thinking everything through, not letting himself go, and technically he still he is but he can feel it slipping.
He doesn't care like he did before and he thinks the longer he stays out here on this battlefield, the longer he keeps watching people die, that ability to care might disappear altogether.
He strikes at the zetsu, lets his kunai tear across its chest and he watches in a strange haze of fascination as the skin splits open and flays like paper across its chest. It lets out a distorted noise and crumples.
He turns in time to see Kiba pinned, held down on his arms and legs. Kiba snarls, teeth bared and it echoes deep from his throat, Neji freezes involuntarily. Kiba growls this time, low and animalistic. Neji's heart pounds in his chest - something in Neji's brain didn't like that sound at all, primal instincts that Neji thought he'd buried, screaming at him to freeze.
Neji's feet finally move as Kiba arches his back and it loosens the zetsu's hold on him enough that he can lift his head.
Kiba's ridiculously strong teeth are bared and they sink into the ghoulish flesh of the clone like it's as easy as Neji's seen him eat an apple. he tears his head to the side and the skin comes away with him.
The clone screams like it can actually feel and it touches something deep inside Neji's stomach. White hot anger that he's been trying to find - anything better than the sickly exhaustion that's been eating away at him.
They're the ones suffering.
They've lost half their forces, all leaving behind families and friends and lovers and pets and neighbours and even just acquaintances who'll feel the searing pain of the absence of human life.
These are just clones.
Nothing is left behind. They never gave up anything to get here, they never lost, they never loved, they never cried, they've never felt like they have.
Neji watches as Kiba crushes the clones dislodged throat between his teeth, staring down another zetsu with a cold ferocity.
Neji relishes in the twitch of the other clone standing just beyond as Kiba spits out the chewed remains at its feet and plants one booted foot on the corpse of the dead zetsu.
Akamaru leaps over and collides with the zetsu. His jaws open wide and he bites down on the zetsu's head. That one screams too and its hands claw at Akamaru's fur like its actually scared.
There's a pop. Akamaru's jaws snap shut and the clone falls silent, arms going limp.
Neji whirls around on battle-tense instinct and overworked Byakugan. A clone claws at him but 's Neji's had time to get used to this. Neji's just that bit faster. He punches the clone with as much force as he can. It's nice, reliving, wonderful to be able to just let go.
Enough with precision, it's not as though the clones have organs that Neji can target anyway so he punches and punches and punches until the clone's head is unrecognisable.
He's on his knees when he becomes aware of his surroundings again. The soft flesh between his kneecap and his shin, digs into a rock hard enough that he's going to be spending time digging it out, the pain jerks up his leg but it blends into the permanent ache of muscles and the pounding of his eyes.
There's screaming in the not so far off distance. It's okay though. Neji's gotten used to the screaming.
He looks down at the clone in front of him and feels his stomach protest. One eye stares unseeing at him, the other crushed. Neji coughs lightly into his hand and wonders if it's worse that he feels sick because of how good it felt to lose himself rather than because of what he actually did.
Kiba's staring at him and Neji's never found that gaze unnerving before but it is now. There's nothing that Neji can see in his expression. Kiba's eyes roam Neji's face for a moment and then down at the clone that's between Neji's legs.
He looks at his own hand, nails turned claw-like, and they're pressed into the neck of the zetsu, digging hard enough into the flesh that the claws of that hand are fully submerged into its flesh.
Akamaru scratches a claw over a dead zetsu's chest and nudges Kiba's face with his nose, whining softly.
Neji sees the exact moment when something in Kiba's eyes clear and he slowly eases his fingers out of the zetsu's dead flesh, white flakes sticking to his hands and under nails.
Kiba reaches a shaky hand to pat Akamaru's fur.
For once he says nothing but a soft smile returns to his face and Neji can see bits of the Kiba he knew before, but not enough. And that's something he never thought he'd say. Neji doesn't he can manage speech quite yet either. His own hands are still trembling and he can't make them stop.
The second he picks up a kunai and as soon as he starts throwing punches, his hands are steady but as soon as he stops, as soon as he starts to think about what h's doing it starts again.
Kiba lifts his head up to the sky, staring at the peaceful blue and visibly calms himself. The muscles in his shoulders ripple and the veins in his hands and the claws retreat.
For a moment Neji watches and wonders when Kiba grew up.
Kiba looks back down, picks up a discarded kunai and holds out a hand to Neji.
It takes his brain a second to realise Kiba's offering a hand up, and he takes it, letting Kiba haul him upright.
Kiba turns around without saying another word and braces himself for the next wave of clones that Neji can see approaching.
Kiba's always been untamed and immature, but Neji's seen this side of him now – a side to him that's heartless and savage and cruel and angry like nothing Neji has seen in any of the other Konoha 12.
This is what war is, Neji thinks. War brings out the worst in people, people do things they'd promised themselves they'd never do. People lose themselves in war.
War makes it easy not to care, makes it easy to stop feeling, makes it easy to let yourself go somewhere else in your head for a while and let your body to the beating.
Even if everything returns to as normal as it can after the war, it won't ever be the same for them. Because Neji knows what he did. Knows he can let himself fall back on ingrained instincts and throw punch after punch and not care in the slightest who he takes out with him.
He knows that Kiba can tear someone's throat out with his bare teeth as easy as biting into a soft pie. He knows Kiba probably won't lose any sleep over the matter either.
This is what war is, Neji thinks, and he sinks his kunai into the chest of the next zetsu clone that appears without an ounce of hesitation.
This is war.
Hi I just have a lot feelings right now and I've always thought that if pushed, Kiba could be scary as fuck so here it is!
I love comments more than life itself, please indulge me :D